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  3. Political Beethoven
  • Cited by 5
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2013
Print publication year:
2012
Online ISBN:
9780511794483
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511794483
Subjects:
Music, Music Criticism, Nineteenth-Century Music
Series:
New Perspectives in Music History and Criticism
Information

Book description

Musicians, music lovers and music critics have typically considered Beethoven's overtly political music as an aberration; at best, it is merely notorious, at worst, it is denigrated and ignored. In Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew returns to the musical and social contexts of the composer's political music throughout his career - from the early marches and anti-French war songs of the 1790s to the grand orchestral and choral works for the Congress of Vienna - to argue that this marginalized functional art has much to teach us about the lofty Beethovenian sounds that came to define serious music in the nineteenth century. Beethoven's much-maligned political compositions, Mathew shows, lead us into the intricate political and aesthetic contexts that shaped all of his oeuvre, thus revealing the stylistic, ideological and psycho-social mechanisms that gave Beethoven's music such a powerful voice - a voice susceptible to repeated political appropriation, even to the present day.

Reviews

'In this meticulously researched volume, the author offers many intriguing points.'

Source: CHOICE

In writing Political Beethoven, Nicholas Mathew has provided a thoroughly-researched and fascinating look at the composer’s lesser-known works, giving a vivid description of the music, criticism, and theatricality of the period surrounding the Congress of Vienna.’

Jane Riegel Ferencz Source: Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association

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